Wow thank you “mind prison” for this revelatory call to action. We should indeed all “share with others” when it comes to this blog
I should have known it was a fucking substack blog before I even clicked.
Post-truth society is near
51–60 of 89 posts
Re: Post-truth society is near
#52> We are never going to know what is real anymore. Yeah, except for all those aliens who actually go outside and see for themselves, or ask people who have been there. You know, like most of humanity would do. :D I get the article's premise but it sounds like a non-issue midterm. A lot of people go through increased financial hardship currently, and their interest in news is waning so the whole thing kind of balances…
> actually go outside and see for themselves, or ask people who have been there
Ya sure, only way forward to know what’s going on between Israel and Gaza is to go there myself and ask around. Same with every other conflict. No problem
Re: Post-truth society is near
#53Post-truth society has already arrived in the mid-2010's. Making fake content was never expensive or difficult to produce to begin with. Misinformation is already expensive to tackle and in many cases nearly undetectable without invasive data collection. Generative AI doesn't change the equation and was never a requirement to successfully manipulate public opinon. Hell, most of these problems with misinformation are…
Generative AI makes it easier to further weaponize, so I would say mid-2010's was the entry (key issues). Now we're about to see it happen everywhere even in places we "thought was safe" (mass market).
What's the meaning of "further" weaponizing something that has already been weaponized?
Re: Post-truth society is near
#54> Cylons/Replicants are going to likely become real within our lifetime. Great! So if me and some of my friends can afford to buy a few replicants together, we can agree offline on some gestures we will make using our replicants ahead of time and then we can witness important events with our replicants, and we will discretely gesture during the events. This will then allow us to determine if the feeds we are seeing f…
Naive to think you won’t have a compromised software stack on your replicant.
Re: Post-truth society is near
#55> We are never going to know what is real anymore. Yeah, except for all those aliens who actually go outside and see for themselves, or ask people who have been there. You know, like most of humanity would do. :D I get the article's premise but it sounds like a non-issue midterm. A lot of people go through increased financial hardship currently, and their interest in news is waning so the whole thing kind of balances…
> actually go outside and see for themselves, or ask people who have been there Ya sure, only way forward to know what’s going on between Israel and Gaza is to go there myself and ask around. Same with every other conflict. No problem
At least in urban parts of the US, I can go outside and learn Jews are not evil masterminds all planning in conjunction to take over the world, and that Muslims/Palestinians are not all brutal terrorists. What saddens me is that so many fail to make the logical leap that 99% of people you know just wanting to live their lives in peace also applies to 99% of people on the planet.
Re: Post-truth society is near
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the problem already exists, but we are approaching something uniquely different in magnitude that is significantly different than prior. I would add the caveat Post-truth is not the moment disinformation exists, but rather the point where the threshold is crossed where truth is no longer discoverable for the majority of content.
But that assumes that we've always lived in a "Truth" society where Truth was discoverable for a majority of content, and I'm not sure that was ever the case for more than like... 10% of the global population for more than a few decades. And it's not even clear to me that that was a net good for everyone involved in a practical sense. A hundred years ago, even people in rich countries often had no simple way to verif…
I agree with that. Truth has always been problematic and never had absolute certainty. Nonetheless, we had reasonable methods to increase the probabilities of what we know under certain conditions.
There was and always will be limits. However, we understood to some degree at least how to rationalize some manner of probabilities for truth. Locality of information, reputation, the amount of congruent data etc.
So I think we are passing from an era of difficult to truth to potentially and era of impossible truth. And yes, some things were already impossible to verify. However, it just simply becomes substantially more and at extremely low cost to manufacture confusion at enormous scale.
Re: Post-truth society is near
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
ChatGPT could fool a lot of people already. Unless you’re looking to probe and check it’s an AI you probably won’t detect it over a chat session, especially with the right prompt giving it a background, context and the right speech/chat patterns.
Maybe in a text chat, but in a fluid one-on-one in-person conversation, or in a group conversation? Absolutely no chance, and no reason to believe it will get to this level, maybe ever.
I mean, have you tried chatGPT’s latest multimodal speech update. The voice generation is pretty damn human like. Again with the right prompt you could definitely fool someone for a while using voice, since that mode is pretty conversational and includes the AI asking relevant, context specific follow up questions.
For an in person, we would need to generate full fledged bodies that probably isn’t happening soon but it’s not insane to think of a mechanical robot under structure covered by artificially generated meat (which we can make now) with a chatGPT brain from 10 years in the future.
Re: Post-truth society is near
#58There is absolutely no chance whatsoever that robots that are so real they are indistinguishable from people will come about in our lifetimes. The amount of breathless speculation since OpenAI released a kind-of-decent text completion program is so far beyond ridiculous at this point.
ChatGPT could fool a lot of people already. Unless you’re looking to probe and check it’s an AI you probably won’t detect it over a chat session, especially with the right prompt giving it a background, context and the right speech/chat patterns.
They are talking about physical robots. Replicants/cylons, as referenced in the article. I agree with them.
Sci-fi style androids will definitely be feasible soon. Some of them will be capable of acting like humans, displaying convincing emotions, forming relationships, etc. However, they will definitely not be indistinguishable from humans at a physical level; not even remotely close.
Even AGI will not achieve that in our lifetimes, unless it first cures aging and disease thus extending our lifetimes indefinitely, which I also (sadly) regard as exceedingly unlikely in our lifetimes.
Re: Post-truth society is near
#59> We are never going to know what is real anymore. Yeah, except for all those aliens who actually go outside and see for themselves, or ask people who have been there. You know, like most of humanity would do. :D I get the article's premise but it sounds like a non-issue midterm. A lot of people go through increased financial hardship currently, and their interest in news is waning so the whole thing kind of balances…
> actually go outside and see for themselves, or ask people who have been there Ya sure, only way forward to know what’s going on between Israel and Gaza is to go there myself and ask around. Same with every other conflict. No problem
And where did I say you can do that for everything?
Also you should not care what happens there unless it starts personally and directly affecting you -- just my opinion.
And before you say that it affects you... I seriously doubt it.
Re: Post-truth society is near
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generative AI makes it easier to further weaponize, so I would say mid-2010's was the entry (key issues). Now we're about to see it happen everywhere even in places we "thought was safe" (mass market).
What's the meaning of "further" weaponizing something that has already been weaponized?
Doing it at scale by non-technical people without leaving a trace.